Difference between a static and a dynamic IP

An IP address is used to communicate between computers. When a server has a static IP this will never change unless someone decides to. This IP is manually entered in the computer or server.An example of who uses a static IP is a web server. Every domain name has a web server, every public web server has an static IP. For example www.google.com has the static IP 74.125.230.112 this IP will never change unless Google decides to move the web server to an other location. Because it isn’t possible to learn every IP-address on the internet we invented DNS (Domain Name System). How DNS works I’ll explain in one of my following tutorials for now just remember that DNS will resolve a domain name to the IP of the server.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of a static IP distribution

Advantages:

You can learn the IP

You can host a web server

Disadvantages

You need to configure an IP on each computer

You need to remember which IP-addresses are already used in your network

What are the advantages and disadvantages of Dynamic IP distribution

90% of the computers use a dynamic IP. This IP is distributed by a DHCP server.

Advantages

You don’t have to configure an IP manually

You can use Dynamic Domain Named Services to find your computer

Disadvantages

You need an DHCP server

You need to configure reserved addresses for printers etc

You don’t now which IP belongs to which computer unless you use DNS

So how do I solve my problem when my ISP gives me a dynamic IP and I want to contact my personal server from the world wide web?

Well, I’m going to explain this for my own ISP (also the router settings, this can be different on your router).

Do I need backup?

Off course you need to backup your data! If you don’t have backups, you don’t have data security!

Depending on the value of your data you will need to make more backups or keep them longer or whatever. You should always ask yourself the question what if I lose all my data? Which data is extremely important.

You can make a backup of various data, for example:

The operating system

The storage server (RAID 5 = NO BACKUP!)

Mail server

SQL server

Web server

When you lose a server or its data you should be able to restore your data in a few hours. You can’t make it to lose all your data. When you are working in a professional environment you will notice that there is a backup plan (if not create one!). This plan indicates how often backups should be made and where they are stored.

When you make a backup never save this on the same disk as the original disk. If you do this, in case of a disk failure you will lose all your data + all your backup data. Therefor its important to have a backup disk or a backup server.

Backup is very important but whats even more important is the restore procedure. In case of a failure you will rely on your backups and you need to restore everything.

You should test if your backups work, test if they still work after you restored them. At least once each year you should test if your backup & recovery plan is working. By testing it, you will be familiar with the procedure and its problems. You can also indicate the time it takes to be up & running again. (Your management will demand answers when things go wrong, be prepared!)

Will Btrfs be the new file system?

We all know that an operating system need a file system to provide access to the disks. So what is a file system? A file system (often also written as filesystem) is a method of storing and organizing computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them. The most known examples are:

FAT

FAT 32

NTFS

EXT

EXT2

EXT3

EXT4

ZFS (Oracle)

Btrfs (“B-tree file system,” pronounced “Butter F S”) is a GPL-licensed copy-on-write file system for Linux announced by Oracle in 2007. This filesystem is still under heavenly development and is NOT ready to be used in an production environment. Btrfs is licensed under the GPL and open for contribution from anyone. Btrfs can do raid0, raid1, raid10. When blocks are read in, checksums are verified and if there are any errors, Btrfs tries to read from an alternate copy.

Debian 6.0 is released! I could not wait to download this distribution and test it. With the release of this version Debian has also decided to release a new website. The previous website was 13 years old so it was time for an update.
In my opinion the new website is beautiful.

Debian 6.0 uses a complete free kernel. If you want to use the non-free software you will need to add the non-free archive
Debian 6.0 functionality,

KDE 4.4

Gnome 2.30

Xfce 4.6

The boot manager of Debian 6.0 is the grub 2.0. Due the use of grub 2.0 it is possible to make your entire system EXT4.

The new Debian profiles itself as stable for servers but also usable for netbooks due the decrease of the boot time. They decreased boot time with starting some scripts simultaneously. There is a new file system which is called BTRFS we will do some research and write a full report about it.

So keep checking our site, we expect this report to be ready in a few weeks.